23 April 2013 12:07 AM

If you think the BBC is doing an injustice to the realities of the Great War, you just wait until 2015

I’ve never had much time for
EastEnders. It always seems to be full of deeply unpleasant characters who bear
no resemblance at all to anyone you ever actually met.

It doesn’t have
any of the wit that is the saving grace of Coronation Street. I am afraid I
have tended to dismiss it as one more West End take on what the
well-educated middle classes believe working class people are like, complete
with the occasional ishoo to try to make the unwashed think the right thoughts
on gay rights, domestic violence, and so on.

So I am
intrigued that the BBC has commissioned a prominent EastEnders figurehead to
write The Great War, which will be broadcast during Armistice Week next year as
a contribution to the centenary of the outbreak of the war.

The writer, Tony
Jordan, has a long and successful record in popular TV. He was one of the
people who did Life on Mars, which shows he has heard of the 1970s.

I do wonder,
however, whether he has a really detailed grasp of the conditions prevailing in
Britain in 1914.

Here is Mr
Jordan, quoted by the Mail on Sunday, about his forthcoming World War One epic:
‘Back then, no-one knew what a world war meant. It was all going to be over by
Christmas and so all the kids dashed in – it was the equivalent of an iPod
craze.’

That’s three
all-time favourite Great War clichés and a crashingly crude anachronism all in
just 33 words. If the final programme keeps up that rate with one cliché for
every 11 words of script, it should be well worth watching.

Didn’t
know what a world war meant? Does that mean the army, which had the sharpest of
lessons about modern firepower in the Boer War and plenty of expertise in
digging trenches? Does it mean the increasingly literate population which had
been devouring bestsellers about the threat of German arms?

All over by
Christmas. Sure. Everybody thought that, without exception. That was why the
1914 Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, made his famous remark about, ‘don’t
bother to put the lights out, we’ll be back for a party next Thursday night.’

All the
kids dashed in, like an iPod craze. Of course. It was, man, like that DJ
Kitchener dude was rapping about your country needs you in his drum ‘n’ bass
act down the nightclub in Accrington, and, like, they all signed up.

I look
forward to more. The 1914 Christmas truce, beloved of every left-wing writer,
should be a treat. Perhaps this time we’ll get Tommy and Fritz comparing notes
about how they gave up smoking. Instead of cigars they will share a bottle of
Malibu.

We’ll get the
home front, with the music halls doing their bit for the recruitment drive.
Brucie was probably doing a series of Strictly Come Fighting at the time. Some
Edwardian Ant and Dec will be shown mocking the rich and famous in Get me Out
of Here, I’m a Celebrity, in which all the sons of general, politicians and
profiteers will be alleged to have dodged the front line.

There will be
heroic anti-war protesters, cruelly kettled and bayonet charged off the steps
of St Paul’s. I wonder if Vanessa Redgrave is still available for a role?

The generals
will all be stupid, cowardly and callous.

I would say the
scene in which Tommy and Fritz wind up hiding in the same shell hole in the
middle of a battle is a racing certainty, not least because Mr Jordan has told
us that one of his heroes will be a British soldier and the other an
18-year-old German. The chances of them not meeting in the TV series are surely
impossibly remote.

Traditionally in
this scene one soldier kills the other and then finds pictures of the new widow
in his tunic, and reads the dead enemy’s last letter to her. The 2014 version
will probably update this to an e-mail.

Mr Jordan
justifies his treatment of the war as follows: ‘If there’s a moron in Tunbridge
Wells who thinks that what we’re commemorating is beating the s*** out of the
Germans, then all I can say is these are the kinds of people who made the war
happen in the first place.’

Personally, I do
not remember a single veteran of either world war who wanted to commemorate beating
the s*** out of the Germans. The motivation of those who commemorate the wars
has always seemed to me to be overwhelmingly a wish to mark the sacrifice of
comrades. The triumphalists Mr Jordan so despises are actually as thin on the
ground as lifelike characters in EastEnders.

There may be
behind this a wish not to offend modern Germany. That is a Germany which has
for 60 years been a model of peaceful democracy, a country which has given its
economic success and its treasured currency to the rest of Europe and received
only abuse and begging in exchange, and where you never hear politicians or
commentators going on about how good it would be to retrieve the lost homelands
in the East.

But Kaiser
Bill’s Germany wasn’t like that. The reason the First World War happened, and
the Second too, was nothing to do with jingoistic morons in Tunbridge Wells,
and everything to do with the German army’s habit of finding itself in other
people’s countries.

Which brings us
to Brussels, a place that seems to crop up quite a lot when you look at British
history.

If you think the
BBC is doing an injustice to the realities of the Great War – which our side
won, by the way – you just wait until 2015. If nothing rings a bell, there’s a
little place just to the south of Brussels called Waterloo.

There was a
battle there, in June 1815, in which the British army, assisted as it happens
by the Germans, did for a French bloke called Napoleon and in so doing
established an order that kept this country out of major wars for almost a
century.

David Cameron
has yet to announce any Government funding for the bicentenary. Perhaps he’s
looking for a way to do it without offending the French.

It’s easy. Just
commission the BBC to do a miniseries. They’d do one with lots of Luddites,
privileged generals, starving workers, grisly punishments for child thieves,
and beautiful oppressed radical heroines. And they wouldn’t once embarrass us
all by mentioning world-conquering French dictators.

This guy and the BBC dont have a clue, no one will be celebrating that the war was won, we will be remembering the British and Commonwealth soldiers killed and the lads who served our country, where is the mention of the French and Americans and other Allies, to put the Germans on an equal footing is just not right.

I am sure many readers will know that the EU and its promoters and apologists have for some time referred to the World Wars as civil wars; so convinced are they of the theory of a single European State they actually think these wars were between fellow Europeans rather than between independent States.

It does no one any favours to distort history as indicated in this report. It does please the left, the pro-EU integrationists and the rest of the anti-British metropolitan elite. Perhaps they alone should be forced to watch such drivel.

Today there should be plenty of comment on John Wilks who published his newsletter "The North Briton" 250 years ago to the day. A publication which would lead to the press freedom and individual liberty of expression we all took for granted in Britain until thus decade. But I suppose for that to be celebrated and explained would show our country in a god light and far ahead of those in continental Europe who now seem the sole focus of adulation by the media.

Great post Mr Doughty. The BBC's problem or more the people that work there are ashamed of what Britain has achieved. The whole of Europe at one time or another has made war on the British and been soundly beaten by the ordinary soldier in spite of occasions of poor leadership. Only as long as people like you and I keep talking about how Britain was great will it be remembered.

Nappoleon wasnt strictly speaking French, he was a Corsican with the blood of the sarraceni in his veins! And of course we worked with Prussia back then, our King was a German, an ancestor of our current PM, after all

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